A former Director of the Ghana School of Law has supported calls for a second look at the law of willfully causing financial loss to the State. Kwaku Ansah Asare said in the spirit of the Golden Jubilee celebrations, law makers ought to revise the law to save public servants who make genuine mistakes from prosecution. His comments on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show drew sharp reactions from some legal experts who disagreed with him, arguing that the law needed to be maintained. The debate came in the wake of the sentencing of the MP for Keta, Dan Abodakpi for a ten-year jail term for causing financial loss to the state. The former Law School Director said public servants in the course of performing their duties were bound to make some genuine mistakes. According to Ansah Asare, even though the intention behind the law was good and needed to be supported, public servants were at great danger. He called for a review of the law in the spirit of the Golden Jubilee celebrations of Ghana’s independence. “Public life is such that there is always an element of discretion and in the exercise of discretion people are bound to make mistakes, genuine mistakes. But the provision as it stands now does not clarify what an act is or what an omission may be that is why I say potentially, it can lead the innocent to the slaughter house.” But Mr. Yoni Kulendi, also a lawyer disagreed with him. According to Kulendi, the law needed to be strengthened in the spirit of the Independence celebrations to demand accountability from public servants. “50th Anniversary yes. But where do we want to take this country? We want to give public officers a blank cheque? There has to be standards that people are held to. One cannot fix them with strict stealing, when we cannot fix them with fraud, where when you look at all of the circumstances of their conduct or their omission you can tell these people deliberately, willfully have caused the public a loss, there ought to be some way of holding these people we trust to determine our future responsible. And if we don’t want a law like this then God save Ghana.” Minority Leader, Alban Bagbin, also a lawyer, supported Mr. Kulendi’s position. He argued that the law was a good one but its application was the problem. “It is not the law that has given room to this problem with application, not at all. It’s just the lack of thoroughness in the analysis involved in both the evidence of the law that is causing all this brouhaha. If you go through all the cases that have gone to the courts for trial in respect of this law and you do a critical analysis of both the facts and the law. You will come to one and only one conclusion; that people have allowed other considerations to influence their judgement.” This is the third time a legal debate has ensued over the law willfully causing financial loss to the state. It has been resurrected this time by the conviction of the MP for Keta, Dan Abodakpi. Earlier debates on the law were necessitated by the incarceration of the late Victor Serlomey and later came up when former finance minister Kwame Peprah and two others were jailed for causing financial loss to the state in the Aveyime Quality Grain case.